


Old Bargains for New Gods

by ahimsabitches



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Animal Death, EIGHT PAGES OF FUCKIN, F/M, I'm so bad at tagging, Oral Sex, Past Character Death, Size Difference, Suicide mention, a little bit of animal blood and gore, if you want anything else tagged please let me know, they rawdoggin it because apparently gods can't get stds i don't make the rules sorry, those are the problematique tags i think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-01-04 18:36:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 16,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18349385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: In this American Gods (mostly TV) AU, Wednesday has found what he hopes will be a handy weapon in the war against the New Gods. But it's not exactly a conventional one-- and he doesn't exactly know how to use it-- and the other Old Gods need convincing. He starts with his hardest sell: Shoshanna, capricious as a summer storm and full of rage. Story updates are Sunday and, of course, Wednesday.Disillusion belongs to my dear friend Savi.





	1. Two Birds

A cigarette in her right hand and a bottle in her left, Shoshanna tossed a leg over Mad Sweeney's lap and snugged her hips into his belly. Her leather vest creaked comfortably as his long-fingered hands gripped her waist.

Mad Sweeney's smile bared as many teeth as hers did, but Shoshanna knew what the unsteady twitch in it meant. She'd seen it in subservient wolves, male hyenas at a matriarch's mouth, and beaten dogs.

The knowledge spread her smile wider, revealing molars sharpened to wolfish points. She took three long gulps from the bottle, not tasting the Scotch in it, and handed it to him. Her fingers left bloody smears on the glass.

He took four. He popped the bottle from his mouth and smacked his lips. Glanced at the label on the heavy square bottle appraisingly. “Not bad fer Scotch. Prefer good Irish whiskey meself.” Sweeney offered the bottle to Shoshanna. His bloody fingerprints overlapped hers.

She took the bottle back and his hand returned to its place on her waist. She liked it there. For the moment. “And I prefer my backcountry shitholes to have at least a fucking _ficus_ or a window to the outside, but this,” she said, glancing around at the bar, all wood and sooty steel and ancient naugahyde stools, “this'll do, I suppose. At least this time I can smell alcohol _before_ piss and puke.”

How _lucky_ they'd been, to find this nearly-empty bar the first exit they'd chosen; how _lucky_ to find the bartender more scared of Mad Sweeney’s fist than of abandoning his post; how _lucky_ to find the town drunk and his two friends already deep in their cups and almost not worth the effort of chasing them out.

Shoshanna had raised the question of the escaped bartender calling the cops on them, but Sweeney had only needed to flip his lucky coin and wink at her.

The light in Sweeney’s green eyes was bright and capering. “Glad her majesty approves.” His hands slipped under her vest and the tank top beneath it like warm thick vines up her back; he straightened from his slouch against the booth to close the distance between them.

Before he could kiss her, she turned her head, took a drag on the cigarette, and blew a cloud of secondhand American Spirit into his face.

He breathed it in like a prayer, his eyelids drooping.

“That's Mama's good boy.” Her voice flowed out of her like a docile pebble-throated tide, hushed and soft. Sweeney moaned, his cock twitching against the crotch of her patchy jeans. His hands curled into unsharpened claws and made dimples in her earth-colored flesh. She nudged the bottle against his left arm, and for a moment he did nothing. Then, he opened one eye, reluctantly pulled his hand out from under her shirt, and drank.

She wanted him drunk. It would take a while, but he wanted it as much as she did.

And didn't he look a _picture_ gazing moonily up at her, his lips parted and eyes half-closed in needful reverence like a desert nomad who'd prayed for rain and received a thunderhead?

Shoshanna reckoned he did.

With the back of the hand not holding the cigarette she caressed his beard and the prickly-shaven side of his head. He leaned into the touch like a grateful dog. The bracelets she’d woven from strips of thin, flexible wood and wide flat stems scraped gently across his face. She combed her fingers through the longer hair at the top of his head, then slowly closed her fist around it. Sweeney did not resist when she forced his head back. She leaned down, her thighs tightening around his hips, and brushed her lips against his ear. “Next time we stop,” she whispered, “I’m gonna drag you up a mountain and when we get to the top I’m gonna fuck you until you forget every scrap of what turned you mad, _Suibhne mac Colmain_.”

Sweeney shuddered a sigh, his exposed Adam’s apple bobbing. A silky ribbon of delight slithered up Shanna's spine. She released his hair and directed the bottle in his hand to his mouth. He sucked down three long swallows like a hungry calf from his mother's udder. Shoshanna took a drag on her cigarette and admired the desire turning his eyes to chips of green fire through a cloud of smoke.

“I think I wanna feckin' lay ya out on the bar an' eat yer cunt till y'scream that name y’just said,” Mad Sweeney growled. “What d'ya say t'that?”

Shoshanna's insides squirmed and pulsed with glee, but she betrayed nothing of it to Sweeney. Instead, she took a thoughtful swig of Scotch and glanced up at the low, beamed ceiling, as if seeking answers hidden in its shadowy corners. “I say... it's your _lucky day_.”

A wildly triumphant grin broke over his long face and he launched both of them out of the booth. Shoshanna’s back hit the table but the pain was distant and meaningless, and so was the sound of an empty glass clattering to the floor but, somehow, not shattering. Shoshanna cackled, wrapping her legs around his waist to keep from falling, but Sweeney's strong, thick arms and big hands clamped her safely to his chest as he crossed to the wide bar, its wooden surface black and sleek with long use. The bottle fell out of her hand and landed neatly on a stool without spilling a drop, and the cigarette fell out of the other into a puddle of beer and fizzled calmly out. Shoshanna wrapped her arms around his neck and sucked in a lungful of the cloyingly smoky reek of Scotch, trying but failing to subdue what about Mad Sweeney that lit up Shoshanna's brain, what soaked her pussy: the bitter-steel bite of battlelust and sweat, the secret velvet scent of heartsblood that made her head swirl madly, and the wild earthsmell of foggy Irish moors haunted by galloping wind.

A moorless, gape-jawed hunger heaved and roared in Shoshanna’s belly, drawing a low moan from her. Her lips peeled unconsciously back from her teeth and she sunk them into Sweeney’s neck, not enough to break the skin but enough to make him stumble and curse.  

Shoshanna allowed herself to be laid across the bar, giggling and squirming like a huge ferret in a leather vest and muddy black boots. Mad Sweeney was making a sound somewhere between a whimper and a snarl, tugging at her belt and making it jingle madly. She raised herself on her elbows to watch him work her jeans open, his nose an inch away from her crotch as if he meant to unzip her fly with his teeth.

He would have if she'd asked, and she made a mental note to do just that next time.

He yanked her jeans down with such force that she skidded a few inches, the skin of her elbows squeaking over the wood. She laughed and lifted her legs so Sweeney could duck beneath the barrier of her jeans bunched at her ankles. He was as _hungry_ as she was, and she would give of herself as she took from him, because he’d been good to her without condition or demand. The bright whirl of hunger swept down low in her belly to meet him as he dipped his head down to her pussy.

“Two birds with one stone, it seems,” a voice boomed into the bar, making them both jump and turn to the door. Which Shoshanna was sure she'd fucking _locked._ “I suppose it's my lucky day too.”


	2. Only That They Live

The fury filling her fell as soon as she heard familiar throaty croaks.

“Huginn! Muninn! Hey, my sweeties!” She swung her legs up and over the bar, clipping Sweeney's head with one boot and not caring, and landed lightly on the floor. Two massive ravens swept toward her, croaking enthusiastically. She opened one arm in unconscious mimic of their wingspan, using the other to yank up her grubby jeans. Both birds tried to land on the same spot on her upper arm, buffeting her with a preposterously large amount of wing. She giggled, lust and anger utterly forgotten in the swift sharpness of feather across her cheek, tough heavy talons sinking into her shoulder, and the good-natured croaks of squabbling birds. “Boys,  _ boys _ , calm down; I have  _ two  _ perch-places, you know!” Unburnished love for the ravens, as large as housecats, warmed her through.

Muninn, finally settled on her left shoulder, dropped something soft and small into her right hand while her left buttoned her jeans. “Oh, thank you, my love,” she said, and popped the dead mouse into her mouth. Its bones crunched like onion sticks; its innards drooled thickly down her throat and quieted the boiling hunger a little. She swallowed and scratched Muninn's chin. A pearly translucent film flicked over his eyes. “Mmm, still warm,” Shoshanna said. “You're a peach.”

Huginn, not to be outdone, offered his gift: a scuffed and dirty Swiss army knife. She gasped and cooed over it, testing each tool, and was pleased to find the biggest blade still sharp. “Ah dear one,” she said to Huginn, nuzzling him, “thank you. It's lovely.” Huginn clacked his beak in acknowledgement as Shoshanna dropped it into the coin pocket of her jeans. It fit like it was made to be there.

Shoshanna demanded worship from humans; from plants and animals she required only that they live. Their existences were worship enough; their every bloom and bellow a prayer, their hoofbeats and flutterings and buzzes and groanings and fin-flicks all the gospel she'd ever need sung in their throats. Because they had known her names before she had; they wrote them in the bubble trails they left; in the snow-tracks, in the veins of their leaves and in the piles of shit and in the slicks of afterbirth, in the bloody scores they left on each other's hides, in the uncurling fern fractals, in the mounds and nests and forests and bowers and meadows and dens and lairs they built.

Shoshanna demanded nothing of them but they live, so even though she and the ravens had had this ritual for as long as the birds had been alive, the familiar and simple pleasure of it ran deep. 

They enjoyed it too; Huginn chattered and nibbled the curve-carved bones piercing her right ear. Muninn danced on her shoulder, holding her necklaces-- braided cords of fishing line festooned with offerings of bottlecaps and flotsam, iridescent beetle shells and fat acorns-- in his beak and shaking them, making them clatter pleasantly.

Grinning brightly, she dug into her vest pockets. “Hmm, let's see,” she said to the ravens, “let's see what I have for my two favorite boys.” She pulled out two fists and held them up to the ravens, who cocked their heads eagerly. “What's here?”

Muninn croaked. Shoshanna giggled. “No, that's not it. Try again.”

Huginn offered his guess.

“Close,” Shoshanna said.

“Fer fuck’s sake,” Sweeney grumbled behind her. 

Shoshanna heard the heavy thud of glass on wood. She leaned conspiratorially close to Huginn. “He's just angry that he has to wait for  _ his  _ treat,” she stage-whispered. Muninn let out a low, lamenting croak. Shoshanna laughed. Both ravens clacked their beaks, their oildrop eyes glittering as if they understood the joke. Shoshanna knew they did.

“Goddamn shit machines is what they are. Every feckin’ time.” Sweeney slapped his shoulder, indicating the plop of birdshit.

“Stop being jealous of them, Sweeney,” she tossed back at him. “It doesn’t become you.” She turned her fists and opened her hands, her palms facing upward. They were empty. She sent a pulse of energy out from a place right below her heart, up her chest and down her arms. It burst from her palms in a rising bubble of seeds, nuts, and berries. They overfilled her cupped hands and cascaded to the floor, pittering on the wood. Huginn and Muninn cawed happily and threw themselves off her shoulders.

She stood watching the birds peck at her gift and occasionally at each other, her hands on her hips, ignoring the third god in the room. Delighted as she'd been to see Huginn and Muninn, their master had interrupted what was going to be a  _ damn _ good fuck, and he'd need a  _ damn good reason _ .

“My apologies, Sweeney, Shoshanna dear, I'll knock next time.”

“ _Fuck_ your apology, old man,” Shoshanna snapped without looking up from the ravens, anger filling the place between her stomach and heart from where she'd pulled the gift-energy.

“Gotta agree with Shoshanna's assessment,” Sweeney said from behind her. “Hey, who’s th' new girl?”

_ New girl? _

Shoshanna jerked her head up. In the ruddy dimness of the bar it was hard to make out the small, shadowy shape half-hidden behind Wednesday's greatcoat, but it  _ was _ there, and it was  _ not  _ human.

Like a hyena sniffing an abandoned kill, Shoshanna took one uncertain step forward, her head stuck out and cocked. The front of her bright green mohawk, ungelled, flopped into her face. She shook it away with a bullish snort.

The being leaving red smears on Wednesday's coat  _ reeked _ of blood. Shoshanna's brow furrowed. She took another step forward, and the being shrank back behind Wednesday so that only the hand gripping his coat and a sliver of pale round face, framed by long lank hair, was visible.

“Her name is Disillusion,” Wednesday proclaimed. “I broke her out of a mental institution.”


	3. Blood-God

The girl Disillusion reeked of _human_ blood... and something else. Energy swirled around her with the idiot violence of a Jovian storm, and Shoshanna didn't even need to be in another world to sense it.

“Th'feck was she doin' at a nuthouse?” Sweeney asked, his voice thick with Scotch and suspicion.

“Languishing,” Wednesday said over Shoshanna's head.

Shoshanna narrowed her eyes, cocked her head first one way, then the other, tasting the strange power around her. The girl peeked one eye out from behind her pale fist, streaked with crusted maroon, and Shoshanna was whacked by three horrible realizations at once.

“Better question,” Shoshanna said, turning a baleful glare on Wednesday, “what the fuck is she doing _here_?”

Wednesday's smile turned up a few watts. “ _Un_ -languishing.”

Shoshanna drew herself up to her full height, which was still a foot shorter than Wednesday, and moved close enough to smell wet wool, ocean rain, and ozoney lightning. She spoke softly, but her voice threatened blacker thunder than Wednesday could conjure. “If she isn't gone from this place in five minutes, I'll expand the sinkhole beside the spent nuclear fuel storage site a mile from here and bury her in five hundred feet of glowy sludge until the sun swallows this rock.”

Wednesday pooched his lower lip out in an exaggerated pleading expression. “But she just got here.”

A low, lethal growl in her throat, Shoshanna's hand shot out with unavoidable speed and grabbed Wednesday's lapels. “We need to talk. Privately.” Without waiting for a response, she hauled Wednesday toward the far end of the bar, where a door to the kitchen stood. A third pair of light, quick footsteps followed them. Shoshanna whipped around, teeth bared, and screeched “FUCK OFF” at the bloody girl-god. She squeaked, hands at her mouth, and froze. Shoshanna pulled Wednesday, muttering something about bad manners, into the kitchen and slammed the door.

Compared to the dim woodiness of the bar, the kitchen was a fluorescent-and-steel shriek. It filled Shoshanna with atavistic loathing. She whirled on Wednesday, trying not to squint in the horrid squeal of light, her hand clenched in his coat. “I knew you had _shit_ for brains, Wednesday, but this is next-level. What the _fuck_ are you playing at, stealing a _New God_ and bringing her to _us?_ ”

Wednesday sighed and put his hands up in an _all-right-all-right-slow-down_ gesture, which only drilled the fury deeper into Shoshanna's brain. “I prefer to use the word 'rescue'. Not only is it closer to the truth, it just sounds a _lot_ better, don't you think?” He closed both hands around Shoshanna's brown fist in his coat. “Please let me keep her? I promise to take _very_ good care of her.”

Shoshanna ripped her hand from his and jabbed a finger at the door. Mad Sweeney's long face filled the porthole and jerked away when she glanced up, but she had no time to be pissed about that now. “When I looked at that god, I realized three things.” She held up her thumb and the first two fingers of her right hand. “One,” she curled her thumb down. “she's a New God, and as such, she _does not fucking belong here._ Two,” she lowered her pointer finger, “she seems _so_ new that not even _she_ understands what her power is or how to use it. That's why it feels like she's drowning in her own confusion. And _three,_ ” Shoshanna placed her upraised middle finger so that it bisected Wednesday's jowly, craggy face, “she's a _blood-god._ A god born of _human sacrifice._ We’ve seen what happens when blood-gods go ballistic. You want a fucking genocide? Because that’s how you get a _genocide._ And if you think I'll raise a hand to stop her, you're a bigger fucking idiot than I'd have thought possible.”

Wednesday's smile remained, split in half by Shoshanna's finger. “Shoshanna, my heart, have a little faith in me,” he said. “All of those observations I had already made, but there’s a bit more to her that may _just_ tilt your opinion.”

Shoshanna cocked an eyebrow and opened a hand. _Well, get on with it._

“One,” he said, strolling jauntily down the long row of steel tables, “she _is_ a New God, but her counterparts were the ones who put her in that terrible institution in the first place. They're responsible for the, ah, _stunted_ state in which you saw her-- the confusion you so aptly perceived.”

“Don’t fucking _patronize_ me, Wednesday,” Shoshanna said, unaware of the small crowd of roaches and a single mouse standing beside a table leg near her, watching them.

“Two, she’s not as wet behind the ears as you think she is. Why would a monopoly like Mister World get so bent out of shape over an infant?”

The question was rhetorical, so Shoshanna said nothing.

“What you saw in her was the concerted effort on the part of our friends Mister World, Technical Boy, Media, and Mister Town to not only muzzle her but to break her down and make her forget who she was born to be: a god of sacrificial _hope._ ”

Shoshanna looked at Wednesday’s retreating back and said nothing.

“I don’t know a lot-- unfortunately our friends the New Gods were almost successful-- but I do know this,” he held up a finger and turned on his heel, “if she were the sort of New God Mister World thought he could either ally with or use, he would have done both long before now. That they did neither-- that they did what they _did_ do-- is _quite_ telling.”

Pieces began to fit together in Shoshanna’s mind. “They’re scared of her.”

Wednesday snapped his fingers and did a little skip-jig, his coat flapping around his ankles. “You’re _brilliant_ , Shoshanna, a true luminary.”

Shoshanna threw up her hands. “What the fuck did I _just_ say?”

Frowning, Wednesday laid a hand over his heart. “I meant that in the deepest sincerity, darling. As I said, Disillusion is not your average Mars or Hebo. She’s meant to carry the denied hope of the sacrificed _forward_ , to act on it and make it so _._ I want to help her understand her own power. Because in helping her, I believe she can help _us_ . She's already very, ah, _disillusioned_ with our friends Mr. World and Mr. Town and Media, who have spent the last...” he flapped his hand, “....trying to muzzle her. I believe that by not only unmuzzling her but teaching her how to bite the right way, we can avoid the consequence you pointed out when you raised your third concern.”

“Genocide,” Shoshanna said flatly, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Yes, which is amusing, given your vociferously stated opinions on humans.”

Anger flared in a red quick zip across her brain. She glanced down and noticed her little audience, which had grown to three mice, two dozen roaches scattered among them, a few beetles among those, and a clot of ants lazily milling through the crowd. “The idea of extinction is as abhorrent to me as it is to you, old man,” she snapped, hating how the half-lie grated in her teeth. “I wouldn't exist without humans, much as I hate them.”

Wednesday's hands, smaller than Sweeney's but just as weighty, spread themselves on her shoulders. “Such is our blessing and our curse, my dear.”

Shoshanna shrugged his hand off one shoulder. “You don't _know_ how she'll turn out. She may represent the denied hope of the dead, but she’s still got a blood-god’s revenge-fury. I _know_ I felt that much. You can't be _sure_ she won’t turn on us. What if she goes ballistic?”

“I’m taking the same risk with you, you know.”

“Are you comparing _me_ to a human-blood-god so confused she doesn't know her ass from a hole in the ground?”

Wednesday arranged a scandalized gape on his face. “My _darling._ I would _never_.” He swept her right hand up in both of his and brought the knuckles to his lips. His two-toned eyes shone with mischief.

She _hated_ the old fuck sometimes. _Hated_ how he could wiggle under her rage and uproot it like a harrow turns over stones that crumble into crumbs. She hated how he reminded her without ever speaking the words that she had more in common with the new blood-god in the other room than she did with him or Czernobog or the Zoryas or even Sweeney. She hated how he alone had treated her like one of them anyway. How he’d walked up to her and re-introduced himself with a reverent bow and an earthen pot full of a fern that had died off millions of years before she’d ever been thought of. Because he'd _known_ who she had been; he’d _known_ how she’d become something nobody had ever seen or could understand: an Old God trying to carry all the same fury and faith and yearning and power in a New-God body she hadn’t ever wanted. And damned if she didn't fucking _hate that too._ She favored him with another black glare, but it was toothless and they both knew it.

Wednesday dropped to one knee, looking up at her with all the eager hopefulness of a young suitor with a ring in a box.

Shoshanna preferred the fern in a pot.

“Can I keep her? _Please?_ ” He squeezed her hand. The bright smile that missed his eyes reminded Shoshanna of the male hyena’s, of the submissive wolf’s.

Which reminded her of Sweeney.

An idea bloomed like a night lily in Shoshanna's mind.

If he wanted the new girl so much, he'd have to fucking  _ earn _ her.


	4. Bellyflop

If he wanted the new girl so much, he'd have to fucking _earn_ her.

But she knew him well enough to know the games he played; she would not get the fuck he’d interrupted if she asked him for it outright. A slow grin spread over her face, very much like the one with which she'd graced Sweeney. She tugged his hands upward, signaling for him to stand, and he did. She drew her fingers along his beltline, hooked two into his trousers, and pulled him close. “What will you do for me if I say yes?”

The only part of Wednesday that moved was one eyebrow as it inched up his forehead. “I have a feeling you're about to tell me.”

“Smart man,” she said, and pressed the entire length of her body to his. As if on reflex, his hands came up and rested lightly on her ribs, neither pulling her in or pushing her away. She made a show of adjusting his pocket square, on which a few thready drops of blood bloomed between the paisley curls. When she finally met his gaze, it felt more like the beginning of an arm-wrestling match than a conversation while tucked in each other's arms. Tongue poking out from between sharky teeth, Shoshanna said, “Let me peg you and you can keep the blood-god.”

Wednesday regarded her for a moment, his heavily-lined face utterly inscrutable. He opened his mouth. Paused. Closed it. “I'm afraid time is of the essence in this case, dearest. Disillusion has nowhere to go, and the thought of leaving her even long enough to--”

“I've got a leprechaun right outside,” Shoshanna said, glancing over his shoulder at the door. “If I ask, he'll reach into a cabinet and pull out a dick just your size. I know the rest won't take long.” She winked.

Wednesday laid a hand over his heart, grimacing in mock agony. “You cut me to the _core_ , Shoshanna.”

“So is that a yes?” She looped her arms around his neck and stood on tiptoe, putting her face as close to Wednesday's as Sweeney's had been to her pussy. That memory plus the proximity of Wednesday's warmth and old good scent, woke the dormant lust. It moaned and moved in her like an ancient humped creature oiling through murky nightwater.

Wednesday gently lifted her arms from his neck. “Might not be a good time for that right now, my darling heart. I had Mexican for lunch. It doesn't sit as quietly as it used to.”

Shoshanna dropped down to flat-foot and stepped back from him. Lust flipped back to anger with vicious speed. The exaggerated apologetic expression on his droopy face would have been funny if he’d used it on someone else. “That's the second time you've cockblocked me in less than half an hour.”

“A new record.”

“Do you want the blood-god or not?”

“I do.”

“Then grab some fucking lube, because it’s either that or I kill her. _Darling heart,_ ” she hissed.

Wednesday leaned on the waist-high prep table beside him. “You were never so liberal with your deadly ultimatums before, Fjorgyn.”

Oh she fucking _hated_ him, hated how he slicked her old names with milk and mead before sliding them smooth as steel out of his mouth and into her belly. “ _Fuck_ you, asshole; I meant what I said.”

Sadness, too subtle to be false, passed across his face like a cloud shadow, and that as much as one of her old names in his deep-rolling voice made her shiver. He pulled a pack of cigarettes-- American Spirit-- out of his pocket, tapped the bottom with the heel of his hand, and offered her the stuck-out one.

She eyed him warily but found no weight in the offering. So she plucked the cigarette out of the pack and took the match he handed her. Leaning down, he presented his rough, wrinkled cheek as if for a kiss, and Shoshanna struck the match on it.

The first hit burned, as it always did. The second soothed the first, and the third settled her. Smoke drifted lazily up to the fluorescent bars in ever-flattening ribbons.

When Wednesday spoke, his voice matched his face: grave and solemn. “I haven’t been completely truthful with you, I confess.”

Shoshanna scoffed, smoke billowing out her nostrils.

Wednesday pocketed the cigarettes. “Our friends the New Gods haven’t just tried to silence Disillusion. They’ve tried to kill her. Many, many, many times.”

The cigarette paused halfway to Shoshanna’s mouth.

“She’s a regular ol’ Rasputin, is our Disillusion. Or rather what would have happened if Rasputin and a phoenix could somehow have mated. Only much, _much_ cuter.”

Shoshanna misliked the sound of _our Disillusion,_ but that wasn’t at the top of the priority list at the moment. “Are you saying she can’t be killed because she just regenerates whenever someone tries?”

“I’m saying that and more. Disillusion is born of human sacrifice; we know that. But when I said she was no Hebo or Mars, I meant it in more ways than one. People do not sacrifice other people to her. People sacrifice _themselves_ , and she exists.”

Shoshanna blinked. “Suicides?”

Wednesday nodded, his lips pursed gravely. “Bloody, violent, desperate, sorrowful, agonizing suicides. Instead of fire, her burden is blood. And, as you might guess, it is _heavy_.”

The punishing bluewhite fluorescent light lay on his skin like death pallor. Shoshanna misliked even more the confusion slowly congealing into foggy grey unease in her mind. She’d been watching humans take their own lives for _her_ whole life, but she’d dismissed the recently growing-- no, _exponentially growing--_ suicide rate with a wave of her hand and a bitter refrain: _Good riddance. Serves them right. Fewer parasites to sicken us._

But evidently the supplicants, pills and guns and knives and steering wheels in hand, had needed something to bleed for long enough-- and loudly enough-- that a New God had been called.

“To bear her own existence, and to commune with those whose sacrifices sustain her, and for reasons perhaps only she knows, she releases the burden from herself when she feels compelled, and returns to the world miraculously fresh and free.”

Shoshanna’s eyebrows flew up. “You’re _shitting_ me. She kills _herself_ whenever she wants and then comes back to life?”

Wednesday’s face broke into a broad, white-toothed smile. He opened his arms in a grand shrug. “What self-respecting god of suicide wouldn’t?”

Unease grew into trepidation. “Bullshit. There’s no such thing as an unkillable god.”

Wednesday tilted his head. “True. Granted, it’s a lot easier when one has few devotees, but the bodies sacrificed to poverty, despair, depression, and the good old American Dream are piling up. Rather _rapidly.”_

And as the pile of suicides grew, so would the blood-god’s power.

“So you understand why I questioned your ultimatum.”

Not a lot frightened Shoshanna, and she wasn’t precisely _scared_ now, but she _was_ certain that Wednesday was preparing to bellyflop into the deep end of an ocean that would have been the tenth day’s lesson if he’d only stayed dangling from that damn tree for a little longer. “Or for the rest of his fucking life,” she muttered to herself.

“Eh?”

Shoshanna glared at him. “You were honest with me; now I’ll be honest with you: all this makes me want to do is kill her harder. The New Gods have no fucking idea how to kill one of their own; they talk big but I’ve seen what happens to them when one even sprains an ankle. It’s like watching a house of cards.” she raised her arms in an inverted V-shape, then let them fall, waving her fingers. “It’s all about globalization with them. _Connectivity_. It makes them strong, but it’s also their weakness. Damage one and you hurt them all.”

Wednesday nodded; this was not news to him. In fact, Shoshanna guessed it was part, if not the whole, of his strategy.

“I’ve killed unkillable gods before. We both have. Killed ‘em and ate ‘em. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one as powerful as your suicide girl out there, but I’ve done it before, and if it means winning this war before it can get started, I’m gonna do it again.”

Speaking the words cemented the decision. She flicked the cigarette away and moved toward the door.


	5. Bird and Calling

The broad greywhite plain of Wednesday’s chest blocked her.

Dark rage filled her like a mushroom cloud. “ _Move,_ Wednesday,” she said to his sleek silver tie, her voice soft but dripping with venom.

“If anyone can help her the most, it’s you,” he said a little breathlessly.

Shoshanna looked up and saw her eyes mirrored in his: black and shineless as an ocean trench. “I said _move._ Or you will be moved.”

Wednesday put up his hands as if Shoshanna had just pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “I mean it. I swear on Huginn and Muninn if you go out there right now and try to take from her in the same way you took from all the other gods you killed, you’re going to die too, and I think you know that. You’ll keep taking and taking and taking from her and she’ll never want you to stop because this is how she _exists_ , dear, to be reborn from her own annihilation, and eventually you’ll stop being you but you won’t be her but her burden will become yours, and Shoshanna, when you found your sister dead, did she stand back up the next day?”

Like an inky tide being drawn out to sea, the black retreated into her pupils until they were once again tiny holes in crisp brown irises, the outer edge ringed with gold. More than the words, the alarm tightening his voice doused her rage. Most of all, he’d sworn on his ravens.

He’d sworn on Huginn and Muninn, the only two beings in all his long life he’d ever been willing to shorten it for.

Shoshanna swallowed a rising lump in her throat and shoved her sister’s memory away. When Wednesday grasped her shoulders, she did not shake off his grip. Empty of rage, with no lust or joy to replace it, she sighed, drooping under the weight of every finger hanging off Wednesday’s heavy hands. She gazed at the layered V of shirt, vest, and coat at Wednesday’s chest without seeing it. “Rodan isn’t dead,” she rasped, her voice a disconsolate desert wind, and placed a hand over the spot between her heart and her stomach at the peak where her ribs met.

“No, but she’s not alive either.”

She twisted herself out from under Wednesday’s hands and folded to her knees before their little audience, which had grown again. She smiled sadly at them. Even though Wednesday only saw the half of it her profile showed him, it was kinder and more sainted than any smile he’d seen painted on flesh or canvas. For a moment, he was looking at one of the first of them, one of the best of them, the god he’d met in the old snowpuffed forest of another age, whose eyes had blazed golden-green and whose hair, dark and fragrant as summer loam, had cascaded down to the snow and trailed behind her, gathering little creatures as they’d walked together. They had walked under the drooping, laden limbs, her ducking and him not having to, neither of them leaving so much as a dimple in the winter carpet. He had learned that he was new and she was already old, that his people had made him and they were waiting for him, ready with idols carved of her stone and her wood, and he would be as father to them as she once had been mother. He had been too new then, too amazed by the snow that hushed and thickened the world, too captivated by the vines caressing her plump cheeks and the gold shimmer of which he seemed to be made, that eked out of his pores and swirled out of his mouth with every breath, to notice the sadness behind her smile or see the tremble in the soft dark arms she’d opened to bid him welcome.

All he’d known was the wonder of his faithful murmuring in his head and the golden light that had lived in both of them but had blazed brighter in him, growing in him and growing him into a _titan_.

 _Well here we both are now,_ he thought to himself and her. _Me an old man missing an eye and you a fractured old woman who, even halved, doesn’t quite fit into her new body._

Like she’d done with Huginn and Muninn, Shoshanna turned an empty palm up and turned inward to the warm yellow spot above her stomach. It pulsed once. Shoshanna felt a bulb of energy travel down her arm and end in a smaller offering: seeds for the mice, fat grubs for the roaches, fresh leaves for the beetles, and two clots of sticky sap for the ants. She deposited her gift in front of the crowd, who paused respectfully before tucking in.

The act of rising to her feet also lifted her spirit a little more. She faced Wednesday, hands fisted on her hips. “All right, you old bastard, I’ll bite. What do you mean I can help her more than anyone else?”

“ _Think_ , Shoshanna. Use the sublimely shining brain I adore with everything that I am. Why do people kill themselves? Despair, yes, but what is despair but desire lacerated and left to bleed out by the system Mister World _himself_ embodies? Disillusion has all the power of a revenge-god; she can’t be killed, and that _scares_ them, but listen to me, Shoshanna, I believe she is meant to represent-- and to _create--_ rebellion against Mister World and his entire existence.”

Realization came slow, but it came heavy. “You mean… you think the whole reason she exists is to be revenge against the New Gods for all the horrible things they’re doing to people?”

A smile crept up one side of his face like a questing vine. “To the _world_.”

Shoshanna opened her mouth and a tense silence dropped in. When words did come, they were barely louder than her audience’s small, hushed eating sounds. “How can you be sure about _any_ of this?”

He shrugged. “I can’t, but let me tell you it was one _hell_ of a case of deja vu when I looked down and saw a pigeon perched on her shoulder as we walked to the car.”

The gears in Shoshanna’s mind ground to a halt. “You _what_?”

A chuckle tumbled in Wednesday’s chest. “She said it happened all the time when she was allowed to go outside. All kinds of animals would flock to her: abandoned dogs, stray cats, pigeons, rats…”

Shoshanna shook her head. Her necklaces rattled softly. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either, but that’s part of the fun, right?” he cocked his head toward the door. “Speak with her. I’ve got a feeling you two have more in common than even _I_ understand. And _you_ might find that you’ll start to understand her before I do.”

Shoshanna cocked a hip against one of the steel tables and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re a good salesman, Wednesday, but I’m not buying what you’re selling.”

Wednesday quirked his mouth and shifted uncomfortably. “This is getting a bit tedious, don’t you think, darling? I’m sure our escorts are wondering when the scandalous rumors will start.”

Shoshanna barked a laugh, basking in his discomfort.

“Besides a false appendage inserted where false appendages don’t usually go, what could I do to appease you, my dear?” He opened his arms, leaning forward in an ingratiating bow.

Shoshanna smiled. Bingo. She pointed her finger at him, thumb upraised, as if she were aiming a pistol. “You still owe me a fuck, old man. Two, if we’re keeping score.”

Something flickered in his eyes-- something, Shoshanna guessed, like apprehension. Fighting down a vindictive grin took effort, and it wasn’t totally successful.

Wednesday let his hands fall to his sides, rippling his greatcoat, and sighed a weary, longsuffering sigh. “Do you really want our second time to be here?” He swept his gaze around them, squinting into the fluorescents. “A cold kitchen table, white tile, and racks of kitchenware aren’t very romantic. What happened to old-fashioned wining and dining first, eh?”

Shoshanna accepted his surrender with the same subtlety and grace with which he’d given it. She hiked a sardonic eyebrow. “Wednesday, our _first_ time was in the middle of a battlefield fucking full of your _dead_ . I had mud in every hole and a bruise on my ass from where your dumb _armor_ kept hitting me.”

She’d also had enough of his snow-and-thunder power searing through her veins to fling the battlefield back to its original green right then. And, for a brief, wild season, the taiga along what would become northern Sweden bulged north a dozen miles and south a dozen more.

Wednesday lifted his chin proudly. “I developed standards between now and then. Or armor went out of fashion. Either way, you deserve better than cold hard steel twice in a row, darling heart.”

It had not taken Shoshanna long to realize that charm came as naturally to Wednesday as sweet to honey, and she’d had his whole life to perfect her immunity to it. But every once in a while-- not often enough for her to be able to get used to it and not too seldom to be meaningless-- he would gutcheck her with sincerity.

The _fucking bastard._

She sneered, hoping the heat in her cheeks wasn’t visible, and stomped toward the door, grabbing his coat as she went. “Then we’ll go into the other room and I’ll have you on the bar.”

She ignored his soft low chuckle and the heat it generated in her and hauled them back into the bar. Yellow-lit darkness and the bitter bite of alcohol smacked her senses at the same time. “Sweeney,” she barked, blinking as her eyes adjusted, “do me a favor and f…”


	6. Nervous Horses

Sweeney slouched at the booth they’d taken when they’d first walked in, left ankle balanced on right knee, both arms laid in a T-shape on the rim of the booth. The coin walking across his knuckles blipped slices of gold light across her vision. The blood-god, Disillusion, had made herself at home in the curve of his body, cuddled against him with her knees drawn up to her chest. Muninn perched on the peak of her knees, his legs tucked under him. Huginn, in similar repose, roosted on her shoulder. Both gods turned to Shoshanna in unison, and she registered the skunky stink of weed just as she noticed thick, pearly ropes of smoke rising from Disillusion’s red-stained lips. Her curious, uncertain gaze rested on Shoshanna’s skin like walking hedgehog bristles.

“Do ya a favor ‘n what?” Sweeney slurred, his gaze bleary and bloodshot.

Shoshanna let her hand fall from Wednesday’s coat and stared, unsure if she was processing what she was seeing correctly. Mouth slack and brow darkly furrowed, she glanced behind her. The mischievous gleam in Wednesday’s eyes was eloquent enough.

Muninn woke and shook his feathers until they turned him into a giant black cotton ball with legs. He stretched and peered at Shoshanna. She held out her right hand and he hopped across the distance between Disillusion’s knees and Shoshanna’s hand with one graceless wingbeat. His talons made deep dimples in her arm as he climbed to her shoulder. She pressed her hand against his sleek body and he croaked softly in her ear.

Apparently the old bastard was _right_. Trepidation, eagerness, fear, soaring hope, anger, savage glee, and a dozen other emotions rose and fell like spumes of surf hammering against a rocky shore as Muninn spoke.

“Disillusion,” she said, surprising herself as much as the girl looking up at her like a nervous puppy. Shoshanna lifted her chin. “Stand up.”

Keeping Huginn steady on her shoulder with a supporting hand, the blood-god obeyed without question or hesitation. Shoshanna didn’t like it. Didn’t particularly like the fact that the girl was taller, wider, _bigger_ than her in every way either, but then again, everyone was now. Despite her size, she seemed to take up less space: she kept her chin to her chest, her shoulders curled inward, and her bloodstreaked hands in a gently squirming knot in front of her. Her nondescript clothes draped her body loosely; only the barest suggestion of a figure showed at her hip-level.

A naked razorblade hung on a piece of dirty twine and rested between the swells of Disillusion’s tits. Old white scars, fresher pink ones, and new red blood blisters freckled her chest where the blade had cut or poked her.

The hurricane of power revolving around her was still there, but now Shoshanna saw it for what it truly was: a cloak lined with daggers; a choke-collar chained tight.

And she had not done it to herself.

Disillusion’s rabbit-red eyes flicked down to Shoshanna’s chest. “I… remember that,” she breathed, her voice resonant but shuddery, as if she suddenly remembered she had the lungpower to speak.

Shoshanna followed her gaze to the archipelago of patches on her vest. “What…”

Disillusion pointed to a patch smack on top of Shoshanna’s left tit, half hidden by the bottom jaw of a shrew hung on a necklace: a white rim encircling a simple red outline of a turtle. Its shell depicted a tiny world map done in red, yellow, black and white.  

“The IEN? You remember being with the IEN?” Shoshnna asked.

Disillusion blinked at her.

“The Indigenous Environmental Network. This.” she pointed at the patch. “You remember being with those people? When?”

“I dunno. I was in a room. And… that symbol was above the door. I don’t… sometimes I end up places and I don’t know why right away, but something always happens.” Disillusion’s gaze slid out of focus. She spoke like a girl in a dream. “There was a man at a desk. He got a phone call from a friend who’d… had an idea. He was… skeptical it could work. But I was there and… and he didn’t _know_ I was there, but I told him that… that he should help. His friend didn’t have a lot of money or know many people but… but he did. The man at the desk. So… I told him that he should help. Try to stop… to fight it.”

Shoshanna registered a dotted line tattooed across the middle of Disillusion’s neck, but her buzzing brain couldn’t process that and everything else. “Fight what?”

Old blood crusted at the base of her long eyelashes and new blood beaded on the tips like dew in hell. “The pipeline.”

“Pipeline? You...you mean the _Keystone_ pipeline?”

Huginn on Disillusions’s left shoulder and Munnin on Shoshanna’s right croaked and clacked their beaks at each other across the small space between the gods.

“I dunno. But… then I remember winter, and all of us outside in the snow. The man was there with his friend. They had signs with that symbol on it. Everyone was yelling. The horses were nervous because of all the…” she raised her arms, her hands all but covered by her long sleeves, and curled her fingers in a monstrous gesture. Then, as if noticing an audience, she swiftly returned her hands to her sides and dipped her head. The curtains of her hair closed over her face.

Shoshanna too remembered a winter with nervous horses, brown men and women screaming as white men in riot gear shot beanbags at them, and brown children digging in oily snow hoping to find fresh snow to melt and drink. She remembered opening sinkholes under backhoes, freezing the fuel line on a crane, and calling down a blizzard when she’d gotten tired of waiting on the white men to fuck off. She shook her head and refocused on Disillusion. “Are you telling me you _inspired the Keystone pipeline protests_?”

One red-rimmed eye peeked out from inside the darkness behind Disillusion’s hair. “I… I guess I helped.”

Shoshanna made a sound remarkably similar to Huginn’s squawk. “You’re fucking joking.” She spun to Wednesday, who had moved to pour himself a drink from the bar. “You’re fucking _joking,_ ” she said to him.

He raised the brandy snifter resting in the crotch of his pointer and middle fingers. Shoshanna’s mind was too much abuzz to care about the insufferably smug smile on his face.

Shoshanna turned back to Disillusion and opened her mouth, but no sound came out. A sudden wave of nausea slammed into her with tsunami-force and poured a thousand-weight into her limbs. She stumbled against Disillusion, clutching her shirt. Muninn, shaken by her movements, flapped his wings to keep his balance. Her head spun wildly. Her face fell onto Disillusion’s shoulder and the awful reek of blood drew a gurgling, wordless groan from her. The strength ran out of her like water and she sunk to her hands and knees despite Disillusion’s efforts to hold her up. Muninn’s weight left her shoulder. He croaked once. Heavy bootsteps on wood approached her. A large hand spread across her back like warm vines. Voices and raven-squawks volleyed over her head. She heard them as if they stood at one end of a long, narrow tunnel through the earth.

She, at the other end, heard the choral nightsounds of a thousand different creatures. The sweet-rot smell of rainforest soil coiled into her brain. And before her on a broad green leaf sat a frog no bigger than her fingernail, his tiny yellow sides and throat bellowsing quicker than a mouse’s. The last of his kind in the world.

“Oh not again,” Shoshanna whimpered.

Hearing her, the little frog rolled a moist black eye up. He told her how hungry he was, how hungry he’d been his whole life. He told her how creatures that had once left him and his kind alone had begun to hunt them, because they were hungry too. He told her that there had only been one sickly mate-- one small clutch of eggs-- in his whole life, and most of them had been eaten. He told her that the ground shook sometimes and the air stunk with strange terrible smells. He told her that when it rained, the drops stung his delicate skin.

He told her all the same things other creatures that had died before him had told her, but there was no comfort in the repetition.

The little frog told her how tired he was, and then his sides became still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really like the song "The Dying Kind" by Joy Williams for Shoshanna. There's definitely some religious overtones to the song, but we *are* talking about gods here after all. Shoshanna is a Hebrew name and it means "lily" or "rose".


	7. Sundering

The little frog told her how tired he was, and then his sides became still.

Howling blackness soared through Shoshanna, churning her guts to a mass of boiling pain. Her stomach clenched and Scotch and half-digested mouse shot out of her mouth. She sobbed in great wrenching gasps between heaves of her stomach in rebellion. The air she tried to pull into her lungs was soggy with the twined, incongruous odors of rainforest and liquor; of blood and wood soaking in cigarette smoke. With effort that made her cry out in pain, she heaved herself to her feet and stumbled toward the front door. Her hip collided brutally with a table and nearly sent her sprawling again. Unable to see through the redblack haze filling her vision, she stumbled forward until she slammed into the doorjamb. She pawed at the door, and suddenly it opened and flung her into the cool March evening.

Bruise-colored fists of cloud, the sun’s last blood on their knuckles, boiled across the sky. The sun, squatting on the horizon as if being beaten into the earth by a godly hand, reached out for the sky in a corona of rainbow color. The sullen red at the edge gave over to the inky night too jealous yet of the sun to allow any stars.

Shoshanna reeled beneath the silent cataclysm of color without seeing it. She bent toward the thick clot of trees behind the roadside bar, the only thing on the long turtlebacked two-lane road for several miles, with the unknowing certainty that drives migratory birds to their nesting grounds.

When gravel underfoot turned to crunching leaves, she let herself fall to her hands and knees. She took fresh green air in huge gulps as if surfacing from a dive, but it did not sate or calm her. On each inhale, a terrible keening noise she could not hear rose from her throat. A well opened in her chest between her heart and her stomach. It was not kind and yellow. It was not Rodan.

 _She had wandered the world-- had_ been _the world-- a passenger in her worshippers’ souls, with as many names as there were ways to be alive and a heart more enduring than many empire of man. Those who loved her gave her to their children, who named her and loved her anew and who gave her to strangers, who reshaped her and gave her new lands, new green, new creatures to meet, new lovers, new sons and daughters. Those who had begotten her had named her the world and this had been their prayer:_ the all is in the one; the one returns to the all; we are strong because you are kind and vigilant and wrathful and we will never forget the faces of our mother. _And because she walked the folds of their brains as often as she walked deer paths in the forest, she knew how they loved her. So she begat them worlds filled with teeth in the dark and full bellies in equal measure, and they made themselves as strong and vigilant and kind as she was, and so it was for a long, beautiful, sweet time._

_But they did forget. Child after child, question after question, they began to doubt her wrath and want more than her kindness. Even as they built themselves up and away from her green and chirping heart, even as they began to worship war over resources she’d always offered them freely and struck their babies blind to her face and deaf to her song the moment they gushed out of their mothers, even as her devotees renounced her at gunpoint or had her blasted out of their hearts by white-man bullets, she loved them, even the white men. And because she loved them she endured their choking smoke and the needles they drilled into her flesh. She loved them as they emptied lands of trees and filled waters with deadly offal, because that was why they’d made her. She remembered their prayer because they’d made her with it; they’d written her veins and built her bones with it, and as long as she kept walking and kept bleeding and breathing, they would remember. She would make them remember._

_She’d loved them, gasping for breath and scalped bloody, punctured and poisoned, drenched in fever-sweat, raped raw, until they wrote a new prayer in a mushroom cloud:_ We are all, They are none, and We are strong because They are weak and We would see the whole world dark and dead before They prove us wrong, and We will never let Them forget Our faces.

_She’d understood then, standing on the little knuckle of rock and sand the humans had named[Elugelab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo), the shadow of a gently bobbing palm leaf painting fitful zebra-stripes of light across her face, that the device currently ticking down its own deathwatch inside a metal drum in front of her was the god they’d created to replace her and to destroy themselves, and they loved it with a great and terrible jealousy. She’d understood then that they had been right to question her vigilance, because she had not found this ugly spore nesting in any of their minds. She had let it germinate and infect them all, all the people she loved, all the people that, if not for this manmade cordyceps about to sprout and show them the horrors they had created for themselves, might have loved her. Might have trusted her. _

_She’d told the gull on her shoulder to fly away, but they’d both known by the time the steel drum started beeping hollowly, it was too late. She’d stood there, listening to the roar inside the drum cycling up and up, and had cupped the gull’s soft head in her hand, as if to shield her from the detonation._

_She’d stood in the idiot-white shriek of wind that had vaporized the gull. She’d screamed and howled and died and grieved her own death in the boiling sea until everything was calm and bright again._

_She’d woken on a beach, her cheek in the sand and her hair crusted with radioactive soot and seafoam, and had only known two things: that the detonation had killed her, and that it had created her. She’d met her sister on the other side of the tiny black island and had gone for the strange god’s throat. But the same sick sores sizzled on that god’s hands as on hers; the same tears tracked pale brown clown-lines down the blackened sand on that god’s cheeks as on hers. But Rodan had not raised a hand to fight Shoshanna’s bite and claw; she’d only raised it in defense of her green and chirping heart._

_So Shoshanna had known a third thing: that her sister had been created by the bomb too, from a god who no longer existed, standing on an island that no longer existed, protecting a gull that no longer existed from a thermonuclear detonation that would never stop existing in the wrathful black pit at Shoshanna’s center._

_A pit that would eventually swallow Rodan too._

Lips peeled back from her teeth in a skeletal snarl, Shoshanna balled her hands into fists and slammed them into the leaf litter once, twice, again.

Her fists rose into the air a fourth time, opened into claws, and plunged down like pistons. Her hands sunk into the earth up to her elbows. Blackness shot through her veins in a lightning-shriek. Her awareness poured through the earth on the black tide. It flicked through empty space, then back into hardpacked earth until it hit a concrete slab. She barked victoriously. Her hands clenched around fistfuls of cool wet dirt and wrenched themselves left as if she were twisting the world’s most rusted faucet. A dormant beetle larva popped in her right hand like a berry and oozed between her fingers.

The earth at the end of her awareness heaved as if vomiting, and the side of the sinkhole closest to the nuclear fuel container sloughed off. A V of exposed, dripping concrete shone in the pale evening light like cleavage on a waterlogged corpse. Shoshanna wrenched her arms in the earth again. A crack sprouted up the concrete: a dark and terrible seedling.

With the insensate knowledge of the animal in the middle of a death-battle, Shoshanna knew she had energy only for one more black pulse; one more turn of her hands. This one shook loose a massive wedge of earth on the other side of the sinkhole, which plunged, trees thrashing like drowning men, into the hole and the station beside it.

There were meters and gauges at the storage station, but the site was old, and the meters were not checked as often as they should have been. They would be pulling the trees off the roof of the building and cleaning a hip-deep layer of dirt out of the halls for weeks before they could even get down to the crack to repair it.

The sinkhole was tidy proof that had been raining here a lot more over the last year than usual. And it was March: the battleground where winter surrendered to spring. But Shoshanna would see to it that winter would not go quietly. She inhaled slowly, pulling every bit of air into her lungs that she could. When they could hold no more, she paused, pursed her lips, and exhaled. The air whistled softly out of her mouth. The ground shivered, as if having an attack of gooseflesh. A great sigh of vapor puffed up from the soil, fluttering Shoshanna’s hair and bootlaces. It would rise for as long as the water in the topsoil held out, and then in a few days it would seed a system of storms so enduring that the people would joke that God must hold a grudge against the county.

And it would rain. And rain. And rain. The groundwater would flow swiftly past the sinkhole, and so would the river several miles from this place.

A rictus of blackly vengeful delight on her face, she drew her awareness back through the damp earth into her fingers, up her arms, and back into the well that had eaten her insides.

Slowly, even that shrunk. There was a subtle _pop_ in her head and suddenly she was herself again, panting and trembling, knelt with her arms half-buried in earth and her nose an inch from an earthworm squirming madly out of the ground.


	8. Offering

There was a subtle _pop_ in her head and suddenly she was herself again, panting and trembling, knelt with her arms half-buried in earth and her nose an inch from an earthworm squirming madly out of the ground.

“Shit.” She braced a foot between her arms and heaved. The earth sucked at her arms. Growling, she wiggled them back and forth to widen the holes in which they were trapped. They came free with a hushed ripping sound and her own momentum flung her onto her back and over again; she bellyflopped to earth with a teeth-rattling _whud_. “Uuuuuuuuuuuugh,” she moaned, dirt gritting in her mouth. Leaves fluttered up as she sighed. One drifted lazily down and landed on her hand.

Movement, too subtle to be human, caught Shoshanna’s ears. Her neck seemed to be made of rusty hundred-pound cables, but she managed to raise her head enough to see four spindly legs in the twilight. And four more, spindlier.

Rising to her feet, and doing so slowly enough to not startle the deer and her fawn, took almost more effort than Shoshanna had left. “It’s not a good idea to stay here,” she said, her voice a weak, gravelly croak. “The water will turn sour soon. You’ll get sick. Leave this place. Tell all the other creatures to leave too.”

The deer’s radar-dish ears swivelled; she glanced at something over Shoshanna’s shoulder, then was gone with her fawn in a rustle of undergrowth.

Footsteps behind her, but they weren’t human either.

“Sweeney said this happens at least once a week now.”

Shoshanna’s heart skipped, but Wednesday’s voice was too level and nonchalant for him to have seen--or understood--what she had just done. He was talking about what had happened in the bar. “At least.”

“When did it start?”

Shoshanna turned a scowl on Wednesday as she brushed dirt off her arms.

He twisted his mouth wryly and held out a squat glass tumbler. It was too dark to tell what was in it, but she took it anyway and sipped. Water. She finished it, nodded in thanks, and handed the glass back to Wednesday. He traded it for another one in his hand. “This one’s from Sweeney.”

She didn’t need to be told; the tiny gleam of gold from where he’d tapped the rim with his coin glowed like a baby firefly. When she touched her lips to the rim of the glass, her tongue tingled with the lonely taste of moor-wind. She knocked back the shot of whiskey and smiled as it coated her throat and dropped energy into her belly.

Wednesday took the glass back and deposited both on a tree limb near his head. He held out the other hand. “And Disillusion.”

She did not take the joint in his hand, glowing red from fire at one end and from blood at the other, right away. As a dog sniffs a suspect table scrap, Shoshanna leaned forward, nostrils fluttering.

“Quickly, darling; it’s burning my hand.”

“Which end,” Shoshanna said, and pinched the crunchy middle of the joint between her thumb and first finger.

Grimacing, Wednesday flapped his hand. “The _burny_ end.”

Shoshanna gingerly closed her lips around the end smeared with blood and inhaled. Instead of tingles and whiskey, her lungs filled with coppery-tasting smoke. She held the hit, coils of it oozing heavily down her chin until the air diluted them enough to rise. When her heart began to knock insistently against her ribs, she exhaled. Halfway between liquid and solid, halfway between metallic blood and earthy smoke, Disillusion’s offering filled her with warm pink energy. Eyelids at half mast, she glanced down and suddenly realized her fingers pinched only empty air.

Something rattled in front of her. Wednesday held out a small plastic box. Tic-Tacs.

Shoshanna hiked an eyebrow. “ _That’s_ your offering?”

“No, dear heart, but you _did_ just barf up a dead mouse. These are for my sake, not yours.”

Understanding was a dropped pebble into a pond. She took the box and shook two out in her hand. They crunched like bone in her jaws. Saliva squirted into her mouth as mint and menthol turned her tongue to hot ice. She grimaced. “The things I do for you, old man.”

“I’m eternally in your debt, Shoshanna.”

Revived by Sweeney’s and Disillusion’s offerings and the bracing taste of the mints, she shook herself and poked the box of Tic-Tacs back into Wednesday’s pocket. She hooked a hand into his open collar and tugged him down to her. He bent stiffly, but he bent enough. His mouth tasted like bourbon and the end of a storm. The beginnings of stubble on his upper lip and chin scratched her. She looped her arms around his neck and felt tension in the set of his shoulders. She sighed inwardly and stood back from him. The starlight was yet too weak to reach them and the moon had not risen, so Shoshanna couldn’t name the strange light in Wednesday’s living eye. Apprehension, like she’d seen in the kitchen? Not just that. Curiosity? Not quite.

“How long will these people have before their hair starts falling out?”

So he _had_ seen. “Depends on how much it rains,” she said evenly.

Wednesday heaved a long, tired sigh.

But he could not guilt her into changing what she’d done, because she felt no remorse, and she knew he knew that. She also thought she knew why he’d been apprehensive in the kitchen. She flattened her hands on his chest directly over his heart.  “I took too much from you last time,” she said solemnly. “I’m sorry; I won’t do that again. I was… weak. And angry.”

“You’re weaker and angrier now.” Wednesday’s voice rumbled.

Shoshanna couldn’t blame the old bastard for a truth they both knew. “So are you,” she said through a half-smile.

“I guess that’s why we’re here,” he said, eyeing the foresty night around them.

When she put her arms around his neck again, he bent easily. “Guess so.”

His hands skated under her vest and spread over her back. She, enveloped in his coated arms and the taste/smell of winter battles, old books, ocean wind and ship’s wood, kissed him hungrily, lust waking and rolling slowly in her belly.

She slid his greatcoat off his shoulders. It fell to the ground with a breezy _whump._ She began to undo his vest buttons. He raised no hand to help her or stop her, only breaking the kiss when she needed to focus on a stubborn button on his shirt. When there were no more layers of cloth between his top half and the cooling night, she began to undo his belt. He moved then; he moved to cup her jaws in his rough warm hands and kiss her again. She purred into his mouth. Her hands, quick at his fly like industrious mice, undid his belt, button, and zipper. His hands wandered down her neck to her bare arms; his tongue wandered along hers; her hand burrowed into his shorts and grasped his cock, halfway to hard. He sighed a groan that vibrated in his chest.

Shoshanna liked that very much. She smiled and flipped her vest, formerly an old leather jacket, off her shoulders, her necklaces clattering. He skinned her threadbare green tank top off her in one smooth upward motion and pressed both hands to her tits. They were small enough lately that she hadn’t needed a bra, and she’d refused to see that as anything but good. The wiry nest of hair on Wednesday’s chest and belly tickled her but it only made her press closer. She tugged his slacks and shorts down; they puddled at his feet in a jingling rush of belt and cloth.

It had been long and long since Wednesday had bared his belly for her, and she found that she wasn’t the only one diminished. Where once her hands had skimmed over thick cords of muscle, they now caressed wiry knots of sinew and pads of saggy flesh. But she was not repelled by this either. It was the way they all were; even Sweeney did not stand as tall as he’d used to.

An image blipped across her mind, so brief and fractured she wasn’t even sure it belonged to her: Odin gazing up at her from behind his dented, bloodspattered helmet. She’d reached out and eased it off with both hands. His dark hair and beard, braided and beaded with sweat and blood, had framed his sootsmeared face, which had just been beginning to wrinkle. She’d smiled, taken his face in her hands, and planted a heartbreakingly soft kiss on the patch over his right eye. Then she’d moved her mouth a little right and licked the blood off his temple. The word he’d spoken against her cheek had been choked with battlefire and reverence.

“ _Gaia_.”


	9. Recharge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turn on "Powerful Stuff" by Sean Hayes as you read this one.
> 
> This chapter contains a tiny spoiler for S2 of the show.

“ _Gaia_.”

Jolted, Shoshanna froze. Wednesday rumbled a question.

“Did you… say something?”

His living eye burned brightly now. “No.”

She searched what of his face she could see in the dark and found no lies. But that did not mean there were none. It didn’t matter. She let the uncertainty of the memory leave her, but the image of him looking up-- _up_ \-- stuck. “Wednesday,” she breathed, “get on your knees.”

His chest rose against hers in another dramatic sigh, but the needful rasp in his voice was genuine. “The things I do for you, Shoshanna.”

A little light from the orange arc-sodium streetlamp by the bar shone through the leafless winter trees and limned Wednesday’s head and shoulders. Leaves rustled. Wednesday’s orange outline sunk smoothly. When she put her arms around him again, his forehead was level with her chin. “That’s better.”

Wednesday pressed his face into the space between her tits and breathed deep of her, his hands sweeping around to the backs of her thighs right above her ass. He squeezed there, trailing kisses over the small black tattoo of the earth on her chest and the roots that grew from it spread out over her tits, down her front, and ended right above her beltline. His rough, stubbled face rasped over the soft sensitive skin on her belly. She shivered and giggled, gooseflesh rippling over her. His hands moved around to her belt buckle as his mouth moved down; she tangled her hands in his dark curls as he worked her belt loose.

His quick, insistent breaths gusted warmly against her, his nose an inch from her belly. The memory of Sweeney flashed; she opened her mouth to command him to unzip her with his teeth, but stopped short. Wednesday, even diminished, was a proud god, and though _he_ had come to _her_ , though he had-- and would-- pay his due, she could sew his hands together but she could not make him pray.

So instead she let him tug her jeans down until they hit her boots. He paused with his lips level with the triangle of dark, curly hair between her legs. For a moment, there was no sound but their breathing. Then Wednesday leaned in and planted a heartbreakingly soft kiss in the middle of the top edge of hair. His hands closed around the backs of her thighs, and she felt little twigs of electricity dance between his hands and his tongue, traveling down, seeking her pussy. A low, jazzy current climbed up her nerves until it filled her and made her shiver. His tongue found her clit and the voltage in her veins surged. She gasped and snapped rigid, her hands unconsciously clenched in Wednesday’s hair. Her pants, bunched at the top of her boots, shackled her ankles and prevented her from giving him more room. Irritation gusted through her. “Mmm. Damn boots,” she murmured.

Wednesday pressed his hands onto the fronts of her thighs. “Sit.”

His softspoken command didn’t connect to anything in Shoshanna’s mind at first; she only cocked her head at him.

“ _Sit_ , dear heart,” he said to her belly. “And consider slip-on shoes next time.” His voice was hushed and thick.

Shoshanna understood then. “You just want me on my back, old man.”

When he raised his head, bright white chips of rising moon glittered in his eyes. “ _You_ were the one who wanted _me,_ darling.”

Caught, Shoshanna grudgingly plunked down on her ass in the crunchy leaves and clunked the toes of her boots together in front of him. The sound of laces whispering through eyelets meshed pleasantly with shifting ground underfoot. The last of Wednesday’s electricity tingled in her clit.

Despite their long history (only what she could remember of it): their young, short, stormy marriage and their shared name, both of which had broken before their son was old enough to understand his own godhood; despite the wide, dark rift that had roared between them after that; despite all the other husbands and children her worshippers had given her and all the other lovers and children his worshippers had given him; despite a dead son neither of them had had the strength to acknowledge; despite her nuclear halving and despite him only seeking her as a soldier for his war after it; despite his absence when she’d lost her sister--and all hope-- and because of what he’d done when he’d chosen to slide back to her side; despite his honeysilk charm and grinning lies, or perhaps because of them, she had _missed_ the old bastard, and she was _glad_ to see him, to have him with her now.

“Hurry up,” she purred.

Shoshanna could see little but the moving curve of Wednesday’s back limned in weak orange light. Taking his sweet time, he pulled one boot off, then other and tugged at the cuffs of her jeans; she lifted her ass off the ground and stuck her right leg out, socked toe pointed daintily below and between his eyes. He purred a wordless murmur and then foot and leg were free. She stuck out the other; he tossed her jeans aside. They landed behind him in a flutter of leaves _._

“I told you before, my darling: slip-on shoes make for a more streamlined sexual experience.”

“Pfft. You can’t curbstomp climate deniers with old-man loafers.”

Wednesday’s smile was so broad the mismatched light from his eyes touched the corners. He chuckled, the sound an earthquake underground, and it drew a warm stripe up her back.

His darkling shape hunkered in front of her. Body alight with hunger, she did what they both wanted: she spread her legs for him. The blood rushing past her ears almost drowned out the sound of rustling leaves as he crawled to her. She watched the fuzzy outline of his head sink toward her pussy and then he was at her, at her like a lion, king of his pride, takes the first bites of a kill, unhurried and unworried about anything other than filling his stomach.

Shoshanna sighed a soft, protracted moan and let herself fall back to the earth. Wednesday hooked one hand around the top of one thigh and pressed the other at the base of the other to angle it open further. Tendrils of electricity traveled from his hands on her thighs and his tongue in her pussy to meet deep and low in her belly, where the clanging red hunger hummed and growled. She twitched and gasped, her back arched and her hands snarling his hair.  

He cupped his tongue under her clit and sucked it into his mouth, hooking it gently with his teeth. Pleasure-pain sizzled up Shoshanna’s spine and made her toes curl against Wednesday’s shoulders. She moaned. Wednesday rolled her clit between his teeth and slipped two fingers, palm-up, into her pussy.

“Oh _Christ,_ ” Shoshanna breathed as a fresh swell of electricity flooded her. She couldn’t tell if the humming vibration between her legs was Wednesday’s voice or his energy, or if it was coming from him at all.

“Wrong guy,” he said, raising his head and pausing the storm in her guts. “The name’s Wednesday.” The slightly dimmer light in the outline of his face briefly winked out.

Shoshanna gaped at him, disbelief a roaring silence in her brain. “Holy shit you still think you’re funny.”

“I think therefore I am. That I am.”

Shoshanna could hear the smile in his rock-tumble voice. It incensed her and aroused her at once. She snapped her fingers and pointed to her unattended pussy. “Shut up and get back to work, old man.”

Chuckling, he did as he was told. He worked her clit first in slow, devotional laps, savoring her taste, and then in quick flicks and strokes. His fingers, curled upward, struck a gong in her guts every time he pumped them in. She gasped and panted and squirmed and cursed, gripping fistfuls of his hair and then fistfuls of leaves and dirt. The electricity in her veins danced with every cell; soon the bright red hunger that had begun in the bar was spinning whitehot in her belly like a star.

“Oh _Wednesday_ ,” she keened, one hand clamped on the back of his head and one hand pressed into the earth, “I’m close.”

Her arm tingled as energy of a different, heavier kind, that tasted of earth instead of lightning, flooded down it from her hand clutching the cool wet soil. The energy swirled into the star Wednesday had put in her belly. She had taken too much from him last time, after all.

“Don’t stop, Odin, _don--_ ”

He rumbled an earthquake sound into her pussy, sank his fingers into her up to the palm, and the star in her belly detonated.

Her entire body clenched around Wednesday’s mouth; the sound that issued from her was halfway between a scream and a wheeze. She distantly felt Wednesday’s hands grip her thighs; she distantly realized he’d need his head back to breathe, but the power surge roasting her neurons had snapped her rigid and she could not have released Wednesday’s head if she’d wanted to.

She bucked and jerked as the orgasm tore through her, jittered and gasped as it slowly ebbed. Wednesday’s head slid out from between her loosening thighs; she let his hair unthread from her fingers. They were each panting as if they’d run a mile, and when Shoshanna found the strength to raise her head, what she saw made her shiver all over again.

Wednesday’s mismatched gimlet gaze, framed by the dark slant of her legs, blazed in the darkness. Lazy contrails drifted up from his eyes. Each exhale was a mist of dim gold pouring out of a mouth split wide in an exhilarated grin.

But didn’t he look a _picture_ there holding her thighs as if gripping the edges of a lifeboat in a boiling seastorm, her juices dripping from his chin, his guts full of power she’d taken from him, doubled with her own, and blasted back into him?

Shoshanna reckoned he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In a few branches of Nordic/Norse myth, Odin was married to the earth goddess Fjorgyn. The masculine form of the name, Fjorgynn, is described in some places as the father of Frigg, another of Odin's wives, and in others as Odin himself. Obviously I'm going with the latter for the sake of this story. Thor is said to be Fjorgyn's son.


	10. Waiting Hit

She sighed contentedly and let herself fall back to the leaves. When her heart slowed and her breathing eased, she realized the only sounds left in their little patch of forest were the distant hush of a passing car, leaves rustling under light, quick paws, and Wednesday’s breathing.

“You okay down there, old man? Didn’t give you a stroke, did I?” She asked without looking away from the stars budding in the sky like otherworldly flowers.

The sound in Wednesday’s throat did not belong in the world either.

He surged forward, his arms landing like pillars in the leaves by her ears. After a moment of surprise, Shoshanna reached up and brought down the face that eclipsed the rising moon with two of different colors and kissed it. Shoshanna tasted herself-- salt-spice and dark earth-- on his creased lips and his loose, scrubby jowls; she tased the faint ozoney tingle of electricity on his tongue, and felt the sweat already slicking his neck-- or maybe that was the condensed vapor she’d set off earlier, not that it mattered.  She looped her legs around him and brought down his hips until she felt his warm hard cock nudge the edge of her pussy.

“For the record,” Wednesday said, the words muffled by her mouth and gold vapor puffing out the corners of their kiss, “I _did_ want you on your back.”

Shoshanna smiled against his lips. “The things I do for you.”

She felt him smile too, and then he slid into her.  

“Ah,” she sighed.

Wednesday thrust once, gently, as if experimenting, and again.

Shoshanna chuckled. “It won’t get bitten off in there, I promise.”

“Mhm,” Wednesday muttered. “That’s for the third date, isn’t it?”

Shoshanna chuckled. “First, if I don’t like ‘em.”

“I’m so glad you liked me.”

She writhed impatiently. “Get on with it, Wednesday.”

He surged into her hard this time. She yelped and brought her knees to her ribs to give him a better angle. He immediately began a sweetly rolling rhythm that struck her deep and made her moan and purr beneath him. The difference between this time and last-- what she remembered of it-- was vast enough to make her wonder just how much _practice_ he’d gotten between now and then. She opened her mouth to ask him, but found she didn’t particularly want to know the answer.

She’d taken too much from him last time, and neither of them were done offering what the other had come here to receive. She stretched her arms high over her head, snaking her body sinuously beneath him, dug her hands under the leaves to the cool dark loam, and began to take from the earth again.

The warm yellow spot below her heart began to glow again; so did the star in her belly. She moaned, basking in the power curling through her body and the pulses of pleasure from Wednesday’s thick cock filling her. Wednesday slowed his rhythm, dipped down to her and nuzzled into the space between her neck and her upraised arm, murmuring.

“What,” Shoshanna panted.

He muttered again, his stubbly cheek rasping against her neck.

“My ear’s up a little higher.”

He seized a handful of her mohawk and twisted her head sharply right. For a brief instant she thought he meant to sink his teeth into her soft, exposed neck.

And she would have let him.

Because even diminished, Wednesday was a proud god, and he looked-- _felt_ \--good with a little pride in his belly, even if it was borrowed. They all liked to feel powerful, which was why some of them had come to her. They were junkies for it, were the Old Gods, and who could exactly blame them? They’d been high on their own creation for most of their lives; to be usurped was one thing. To endure watching themselves be slowly leached of everything that had made them worthy of worship was a more terrible hell than they could face by themselves.

So some of them had come to Rodan first, of course. Rodan who gave; Rodan who loved; Rodan who saved; Rodan who grew things and held hope like newly hatched eggs and wielded it like an AR-15 and was warm and green, who trusted her sister and who had died because of it.

Then they’d come to Shoshanna, who because her sister’s light lived weakly-- but _lived_ \-- next to the howling black that was her nature, knew how to make them feel powerful.

Because, in a way, it was her job. She could give as she took, and all of them knew what was left among them needed to be shared. So they came to her seeking, and that in itself was an offering. Because they came on their knees, and they did not come until she commanded it.

Even the proud gods, who believed so desperately that power wasn’t cocaine and that they were not addicted, weren’t above a hit when it lay naked and waiting in the leaf litter beneath them.

And so they wrote their own prayers to themselves, and so it was now, for whatever beautiful sweet time they had left.

Wednesday did not rip into her neck. Instead, he pressed his cheek to hers and hissed, his breath gusting hotly in her ear, “I said I have to slow down.” He released her hair, panting lightly, and stopped thrusting, half in and half out of her.

Smiling softly, she brushed a stray curl out of his face. Her finger traced a line in the sweat on his mountainous brow.  “Tired or close?” she asked, knowing the answer already; the eldritch vapor threading up from his eyes and mouth had all but disappeared.

“Ah. Both.”

“Then--” her hand skated down his cheek and shoulder to his ribs, and there she pressed the flat of her palm. Quickly, to hurt him less, she snapped her fingers into claws and sunk them into Wednesday as she’d done to the earth before he’d found her. “Let me take over.”

He barked, the sound tight and strangled, and clutched her wrist, pressing her bark-and-grass bracelets into her skin. “Sho--shhhaaa _aaahhhh_ \--!” His shout ended in a choking grunt and he curled down around her sunken hand as she’d curled around his head in her pussy.

“That’s Mama’s good boy.” Her voice flowed out of her like a docile pebble-throated tide, hushed and soft. She gave a mental command-- _blink_ \-- and a bubble of warm energy slithered from her left hand still dug into the earth, up her arm, across her chest, and down her right, into Wednesday. When it entered him it pulsed a glow, illuminating the scaffolding of his ribs and spine beneath his flesh, and then winked out.

Wednesday heaved a great, calming sigh. His ribs expanded and settled under her hand. His trembling grip on her wrist loosened.

“There. Better?” She asked.

“It _hurts_ , darling,” he said, his voice a gaspy croak.

Shoshanna clicked her tongue. “You could have had the dildo.”

The muscles latticed across Wednesday’s ribs slid beneath her hand as he chuckled. “I like this better anyway.”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling his cock hot and hard and twitching in her pussy. “Me too.” she pressed both hands, one sunk into his flesh and the other still separate, gently against his chest. “Up. On _your_ back now, old man.”

He did as he was bid, grunting and groaning as Shoshanna’s hand twisted and pulled at his flesh. She straddled him and eased herself down on his cock, already dripping with her juices. She tilted back as far as she could with her hand still attached to his barrel chest, savoring the way his cock filled her at a new and deeper angle, the way it nudged her g-spot in a way that could make her come if she could make _him_ last that long.

She reckoned she could.

She rocked her hips back and forth in one liquid motion, testing angles, and Wednesday gasped and gripped her thighs, the jeweled lights of his eyes rolling back to illuminate his half-closed eyelids.

“Oh, slow, darling, _slllloooowww_.” The last word poured out of his mouth like smoky honey.

Shoshanna sat still and grinned. “So much for the _legendary_ stamina I had to endure hearing about from all your conquests.”

“Ah, but few of them bewitched me as you did, and _do_ , darling heart.”

Shoshanna scoffed and stuffed the swell of emotion threatening to surface back down into the bottom of her brain. “You need a thousand Tic Tacs to wash the taste of all the shit that comes out of your mouth, old man.” She squeezed his ribs. He hissed, his lips peeled back from his teeth, and grunted in pain. His cock pulsed even as she twisted her hand, and the feeling filled her with delight. She called on the gnarling hungry blackness in her; it opened its slavering jaws and sucked a gulp of Wednesday up her arm. She cooed and shivered pleasurably as it poured into the space between her heart and her stomach, then outward in a radiating mass like slow blue lightning bolts. Salty sea-wind tingled on her tongue; smoke and old wood filled her nose. Wednesday grunted and sighed, his hands unconsciously squeezing the meat of her thighs. She moved her hips again. “Still close?” She whispered.

Wednesday’s throat clicked loudly as he swallowed. “That wasn’t fair.”

She took that as a no. “Stop fretting, _darling heart_ ; I’m nowhere _near_ done with you.”

Wednesday groused something she couldn’t understand and grabbed her hips, his thumbs pressing against the points of her pelvis. She pitched forward into his grip and set her own rocking rhythm, her necklaces clinking and clattering against her chest, one hand dug into his skin up to the knuckles and one hand guiding his up to her tits. He give her nipple a quick, brutal pinch. She yipped. Zapped, the hungry black below her heart groaned and roiled and yearned, crawling through her guts, pumping Wednesday out of himself as he added his own needful thrusts to Shoshanna’s bronco-rhythm.

Her veins sizzling with lust and power, Shoshanna dug her toes into the earth and directed the black downward with a mental command.

Instead of flowing out of her, it drew power from the earth into her. Unlike the pool of energy in which the Old Gods paddled, shrinking a little every day, Shoshanna could take of the earth until she exploded, and she would not have taken enough to even make a single leaf shrivel. This was its beauty, and her bane: though she could take freely, the power was not _hers_. It could not sustain her-- or any of them-- for very long. Shoshanna could use it to whatever end she chose, but in doing so it often left her more drained than when she’d begun.

But she _could_ use it, and she could _share_ it, and the power curling up her arm from Wednesday _was_ real and it-- the greatest offering any god could give--grew the whirling yellow warmth nestled in her chest. Soon it would meet the growing coil of lust in her belly and when it did…

The god on his back in front of her seemed to flicker like an old film reel, and beneath the crisp blue eye was a patch; beneath the short, styled curls was a bushy mane of black and silver; beneath the wiry arms and beginnings of an old-man belly was a warrior-king, bearded and growling, furious and wise, utterly bound to her by his cock in her cunt and her claw in his flesh, and Shoshanna had to look away to keep the sight from hurling her over the edge right then.

He bucked beneath her as if he meant to throw her; she rode him because she meant to tame him. He began to speak, but Shoshanna could not hear him over the roar of her own guts, cycling up to the breaking point.

Because it demanded a moment of focus, she paused, and, squeezing Wednesday’s ribs, gave the mental command again and reversed the flow of power in her. Now instead of taking from the earth, she could give to him.

“Wednesday,” she panted, “ready?”

His teeth gleamed white in the moonlight. He squirmed impatiently beneath her. “Get on with it, Shoshanna.”

Laughing, she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had had "Powerful Stuff" by Sean Hayes (see previous chapter) picked out for these two before I'd heard "As It Was" by Hozier, and as much as I resisted giving in to Hozer-mania, I couldn't help but give this song to them too. According to Hozier, it's a song sung in the point of view of someone returning to a person they love after a long time. Although you'd never get either of these two morons to use the word "love", even to themselves, Wednesday and Shoshanna share a profound, enduring bond for which there is no other word.


	11. Bargain Struck

It only took a few more undulations of her hips, a few more times his cock moved against that little patch of nerves inside her, for the delicious yellow bomb in her guts to go off. 

The orgasm blasted up from her belly like a landslide made of lightning, snapping her back into a severe arch, seizing her muscles, hurling all the power she’d taken from the earth and some she’d taken from Wednesday back out and into him in a bright white gust. She threw her head back and squealed, heedless of the forest animals that, wary of the noise the gods had been making as they rutted but tolerant of it, skittered away at the sudden alien shriek.

Wednesday bellowed beneath her, his fingernails biting painfully into her thighs. He punched his hips up once, twice, forcing his cock against the back of her cunt, and that pain was darker, sweeter, and she loved it like she loved the way his cock pulsed thickly inside her, spilling a new kind of warmth into her. 

Heartbeat by heartbeat, the orgasm unwound from her. She sagged forward, trembling, and noticed two things: the vaporous gold billowing out of her mouth like winter breath, and the world behind the cloud, which was…  _ lighter _ . Dazed, she gazed at the trees, which stood out in cold white clarity, as if the moon had been magnified. It had not, though; it still hid behind the skeletal pre-spring trees, a small white coin in the sky. The stars remained as they were: the brilliant spray of a bigger god’s uncovered sneeze. 

Wednesday’s grip on her thighs changed; Shoshanna glanced down. Despite the full dark, she could see him clearly. A wide brown ribbon of aether drifted up from one eye and a blue one from the other. She could see golden light glowing in his throat through his gently parted mouth. He looked at her, the expression on his face one she couldn’t exactly name and didn’t really need to.

Fondness for the old god warmed her, even if it was just post-orgasm brain chemicals. She smiled and gently unanchored her hand from his chest, as if lifting it from something very sticky. He grunted softly. Freed, she stretched her arms over her head, snaking her body on top of him and purring as the movement sent a pulse of pleasure through them both. Wednesday rumbled and skimmed his hands up her front. They briefly tangled in her necklaces and tugged her downward. “Ow, wait,” she said as the sharp end of a piece of seaglass poked her neck. She picked his fingers out of the snarled fishing line. He held the hand that had been attached to him and pulled it down to his lips. She bent to him smoothly, folding at the waist until she lay across his chest. His cock, soft now, slid out of her. She tossed her necklaces over her shoulder so they would not be pressed between them and sighed as she felt his cooling come leaking out of her. 

Wednesday sighed contentedly, lifting Shoshanna a few inches. Twin bull-clouds of gold vapor poured out of his nostrils, already less thick than they were a minute ago. “Do you remember what I said to you last time?” He asked, his voice dark and smooth like silt on a riverbed. 

Shoshanna cocked her head and cast her memory back to the battlefield, Odin in his armor, and the muddy-bloody smears he’d left on her body, but couldn’t conjure anything but a fractured jumble of images, odors, emotions. She shook her head. “Everything before I woke up on the beach is...patchy.”

Wednesday tucked one hand behind his head and regarded her with an inscrutable smile on his craggy face. “I said you were beautiful. And you still are.”

Shoshanna peered at him. There were more words--  _ different  _ words-- behind Wednesday’s teeth. But charm, which was lying’s kissing-cousin, came as naturally to Wednesday as sweet came to honey. 

“Huh-uh. What did you really say?”

“I said you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” He stretched his arms out. “Great and terrible as the dawn. Treacherous as the sea. Fair as the snow upon the mountain. Stronger than all the foundations of the earth. All shall worship you, my darling, and despair.”

Shoshanna faceplanted in Wednesday’s chest hair. “You dumb idiot. Stop quoting Lord of the Rings and tell me what you said.”

“I just did.”

Shoshanna debated with herself whether it was worth continuing to slam her head against this particular wall, and decided it was not. Not right now, anyway. He wouldn’t have brought it up if he hadn’t had a reason, and even if that reason was to fuck with her, she wouldn’t let him ruin her good mood. “All right, Gandalf,  _ keep your fucking secrets, _ ” she mock sneered at him and dismounted. 

His coat lay in a puddle of moonlit wool a few feet from them. She crawled to it and pulled out the pocket square and wiped his come off her thighs and her pussy. Then she dug in the pockets, briefly mourning the natural night-dimness returning to her vision, until she found the pack of cigarettes he’d offered her earlier. She pulled one out. “Want one?”

“No thank you; I don’t smoke.”

“Then why the fuck are these in your-- no, nevermind.” She flapped her hand and struck a match on a tree. When she turned back to him, American Spirit mingling with the last of the gold god-mist in her lungs, Wednesday was already up and scooping his clothes off the forest floor. Dismay rose in her. “Hey, where’s the fucking fire?”

“As I told you before, Shoshanna dear, time is against us. I broke Disillusion out of a very heavily-guarded mental institution, and our friend Mister World is likely trying to track her down as we speak. I need to get her somewhere out of his  _ very long _ reach.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped come off his belly.

Disillusion and the conversation in the fluorescent bar kitchen seemed a hundred miles behind her, with the little frog, the nuclear fuel storage site, and Wednesday’s fuck between them, and she did  _ not _ appreciate being reminded of the bargain she’d actually struck in the fucking: Disillusion as one of them. She snorted smoke petulantly. “And where, O Wise Greybeard, might you find such a place?”

Wednesday buttoned his vest and brushed leaves and dirt off his slacks. “Chicago, hopefully.”

“Are you seriously thinking about hiding  _ her _ with  _ Czernobog _ ?”

Wednesday swept his coat on and sighed. “Not optimal, but there are only two gods Mister World hesitates to provoke, and my first choice has made it  _ quite _ clear how she feels about our sweet Disillusion.” 

Shoshanna blinked. 

“Although,” Wednesday said, holding Shoshanna’s jeans out to her, “I hope you’ll at least visit. I still believe you could help her the most.”

Cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth, she shook out her jeans and stuck a leg in. “What happens if Czernobog says no, which he will?”

Wednesday smiled and plucked the two glass tumblers from the tree branch upon which he’d deposited them earlier. “I convinced  _ you _ ,” he pointed and winked his blue eye, “and you were the harder sell.”

Shoshanna barked a laugh, almost losing her cigarette. “Here’s some advice, because you clearly need it: bring lube, because Czernobog won’t just want to fuck you. He’ll want to fuck you with the business end of his fucking  _ hammer _ .” She took her vest from Wednesday and shrugged it on. 

“Then come with us, dear heart,” he said. “Save me from such an ignominious fate.”

“Pff, are you kidding?” Shoshanna laughed, lacing her boots. “I’d  _ pay  _ to see that.”

“It’s such a comfort to have you in my corner.”

Shoshanna scoffed, thankful for the darkness that hid her smile. “Sweeney and I aren’t done. But maybe after we hit Nashville I’ll mention Chicago.”

“Deal.”

They walked back to the bar together in companionable silence, the last aethereal light trailing up from their eyes and dissipating in the chilly night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a fun ride, folks. Shoshanna and Wednesday agree. Thanks for reading. <3


End file.
